Comment by 59percentmore
3 hours ago
I think it's the opposite. None of the players in XR wanted to be Apple'd, least of all Apple. That is, create a base product that someone else would refine in order to drink their milkshake. Apple delayed the AVP multiple times hoping to avoid getting sniped by Meta and Google et al., each time requiring a partial rebuild as the underlying tech advanced. They would have loved to have been able to get something out when Robert Scoble was initially raving in the late 2010s, but everyone was on the same page about not wanting to sink billions into development only to have to cede the market to someone responding to your strategy. So, instead, they all dragged their feet.
If XR companies had been as "reckless" with their product strategies as mobile companies in the 90s and 2000s, AVP would have had its iPod moment 6 years ago and we'd be hurtling towards the facephone. The market suffered because of the entrenchment of incumbents with all-too-clear memories.
Think Apple fell for the trap of assuming they would eventually solve the glasses form factor and then fell for the second trap of convincing themselves that passthrough VR was the same as their real XR vision.
I think that's a good shorthand. Apple needed cool glasses that could do useful xR in ways that weren't just useful to gamer geeks.